I’m proud of the people regarding the terrible fire in Lahaina, Hawaii, on the island of Maui during the summer of 2023.  Early in learning why a raging fire broke out that destroyed the entire town and so far killed entire families, with over 500 people wiped away from their lives, credible people were sharing videos of some beam weapon that was igniting the fire, aggravating its spread.  So from moment one, many people were not falling for the narrative that a raging fire had just burst out and destroyed the entire town.  The sirens didn’t go off because the government official feared that people might be scared and run into the fire in the hills surrounding the city.  And the loser in charge of the water to fight the fire was afraid that he might upset the “water spirit” by using it for such a catastrophic event.  Virtually everything about the Lahaina fire that destroyed the entire town resulted from some government pinhead and stupidity, and people have learned from Covid not to trust the experts.  Because the experts are usually bought and paid for and serve other kinds of powers, such as the World Economic Forum.  Immediately people assumed that the fire had been started by some nefarious characters who wanted the town for some other purpose, which obviously would be revealed in who did what with the land in the aftermath.  Bill Gates had a house near that location that wasn’t touched by fire, and people noticed it.  People were asking the right questions in the devastating aftermath, where we are today.  We should expect to be lied to by an incompetent government.  And when there are major disasters like this one, we should look for who profits from the demise because there is probably something to it.

But at the very least, conspiracies about motivation are not needed here.  Asking hard questions is healthy, and the answers are likely harder to digest.  But we know that significant incompetence was on full display, which is the most dangerous aspect of the fire and the government meant to protect the town’s people.  We live in a time where the experiment of the Administrative State, as much as we might complain about it when they are slow to get us a check from our tax returns or answer our complaints about some service they are in charge of, has failed and failed to the point where they are just openly dangerous.  There isn’t much of a core competency we can trust about an administrative state government and its slow-minded, lazy employees.  This is a shame, but it’s a glaring reality in 2023.  It always was to a large degree, but this is different.  People seem finally ready to admit that they’ll never hear from the government, “I’m here to help.”  Instead, they’ll hear, “I’m on my lunch break, I’m working from home because of Covid,” or “I want more money to sit around and do less work.”  The liberal playbook of Marxist environmentalism is doing the same thing to power companies worldwide.  In my state of Ohio, I have talked explicitly about the FirstEnergy problem, where radical politics has attacked any politician who has tried to have a relationship with them.  The radicals want to get rid of nuclear energy and are trying to put that power company out of business and force them to say uncle with renewables, solar, and wind.  And that looks to be the same kind of case at this massive fire in Hawaii.

The experts, the same kind of experts who told us not to take Ivermectin to treat Covid, which turned out to be disastrously lousy advice, have indicated that the electric company in Hawaii may have had poor infrastructure and that a spark arch might have been the cause of the fire.  And as bad as that sounds, if it’s true, then the reason is even worse because it’s evident that the operational money that should have been going into improving their grid was instead going into the hole of renewable energy because the tentacles of liberal climate science are all over this catastrophe.  They caused problems, and once there was an emergency, they failed to warn people of the danger or give them the tools to fight the fire.  The evidence points to a new kind of warfare where the government can completely manipulate circumstances to fit the desires of their fundraising needs.  Suppose a wealthy donor wants instant oceanfront property for some nefarious reason. In that case, the government can burn down an entire town using the justification of green energy to displace everyone so that they can destroy the property, sell it to some investor for dirt cheap and blame it on some excuse created by the minds of a bureaucratic administrative state as the cover fire for lawsuits.  And nobody will ever figure it out, “they think,” because everyone is too busy trying to get a good ESG score to notice.  Rather than providing good power to the needs of the people, this power company in Lahaina, Hawaii, was more concerned with environmental compliance than the needs of the people they were supposed to serve, and the results have been devastating. 

In every layer of the failure, from the power company to the government agencies in charge of crisis management, we see that cultural Marxism, with various degrees of communism and socialism sprinkled throughout the Administrative State, can be traced to bad centralized policy that does not serve people.  It has made people victims of it, not benefactors.  And when people die due to the government’s actions, immediately the narrative from the media is to underreport the crises deliberately.  Who needs conspiracy theories when it’s so overtly apparent that the government, a collective body of lazy, liberal employees, is just dumb?  That the cause of the fire was dumbness, whether nefarious or accidental.  The wrong ideas persuading the bad economic objectives put the people of Lahaina, Hawaii, in danger and destroyed many lives.  We live in a time when we can’t even trust the water meter reader.  That government activism destroys an affordable kilowatt hour by power companies because they are more worried about appeasing Larry Fink at BlackRock and their environmental terrorism.  When you give dumb, lazy people as much power as this modern age of government official working for an incompetent administrative state has, their mistakes will be deadly, and the aftermath catastrophic.  Like everything that the government touches, disaster follows in its wake, whether it’s the teaching of kids in government schools, to the license bureau; listening to the authorities is an excellent way to get killed and lose everything you’ve spent a lifetime trying to build.  Governments and their Marxist sensibilities are destroyers and certainly do not have anybody’s best interests as their priority, which was never more evident than in the aftermath of the Lahaina, Hawaii fire.  Aside from any nefarious World Economic Forum intentions, the real problem was incompetence and having the wrong people in bad positions to make all the wrong decisions. Purposeful or not, the results were a disaster for innocent people who were guilty of trusting the government too much and have now paid for it with their lives. 

Rich Hoffman